Studio Farm Products

My last farm visit in August takes me to Studio Farm just up the road in Voluntown.  Since retirement, Dot and Dick Wingate devote full time to their farm operation.  As customer demand increased, Dot and Dick combined forces with their daughter, Belinda Learned and her husband Ed. With the purchase of Stony Ledge Farm in l992 and Valley View farm in 2007, this farming family has added more acreage and another generation of helpers. 

In addition to vegetables, Belinda and Ed raise beef cattle, pigs and chickens -- both as meat birds and as egg producers. Together, the families work together under the name Studio Farm Products.

It is a constant juggle to balance the various aspects of the operation: two Farmers Markets a week, a large CSA (community supported agriculture) membership, gardens and animals care, and continuous conversion of berry and fruit harvests into small batches of jellies and jams. 

When I arrive at Studio Farm, Dot is washing freshly pulled onions under an outdoor spigot.  Her dish of the day is rhubarb chutney.  This sweet and sour mixture includes sugar, spices, vinegar, and onions along with rhubarb.  On the kitchen stove, two huge pots of chopped rhubarb await the addition of other ingredients. 

Dick slices onions.  Dot reads from a laminated recipe card, then carefully measures a cup of sugar.  Simultaneously, she fields my questions.  I lack confidence in my own ability to perform such multi-tasking!  Perhaps Dot’s unflappable concentration is the result of raising four children while carrying out the annual summer ritual of home canning.

“We’ve always been self-sufficient,” she says. "We were both teachers and didn’t have large salaries.  Having a garden and putting up food has always been our way of life.”

I ask what preserves they prepare.  

“We start with strawberries in the spring.  Then go on to blueberries and other fruit.  We offer a wide variety of jams and jellies ... from blueberry ginger to rhubarb marmalade.  Most come with a low sugar and no sugar options.” At market, Studio Farm Products displays jars of preserves in neat rows.  Prices are consistent.  All 4oz jars cost $3.00; all 8oz jars cost $6.00.”

Studio Farm Products has benefited from new food production regulations which were formalized by the State of Connecticut on January 1, 2011.  These regulations allow the production of “acidified foods with the pH value of 4.6 or less” to be produced on the “premises of residential farms.”